Local Commercials

Worst Local Commercials: Always, always hard-to-beat in the super sucky category are Oceanic Time Warner's local television spots. The national ones aren't so bad.

Runner up: HEMIC

Best adaptation of a national commercial: Kaiser Permanente's "Ha" (breath of life) version of the thrive campaign. Riveting. And it doesn't get old.

Could use some editing: Hawaii Meth Project's commercials need some local people. Great media buy, but by watching,you'd think only haole kids did meth.

Good comeback: Hawaiian Telcom's reminder that they go where no one else will.

Book Review

Stephen Levitt's latest book, Superfreakonomics is out and he is making the rounds.

We've read the book. It's not as startling as his first, nor as well written as Gladwell's Outliers, but the conversational tone makes it an easy page turner, and there are some interesting ideas...

Like ex-Microsoft billionaire's Nathan Mhyrvold's super simple idea for cooling down surface water temperatures, thereby undermining a hurricane's ability to build to a super freaky force.

Or the fact that if suicide bombers bought life insurance, they'd be harder to track.

Apparently a lot of liberal tree huggers are mad because Levitt and Dubner ask us to remove our moralistic angst about global warming (or not) and look for simpler solutions.

We're reading Gladwell's "What the Dog Saw" next.

No Names, Big Salaries

The Yankees have no names on their uniforms because its a team sport. So says Wikipedia, which contends that the Yankees are observing an original baseball tradition.

But nobody has bigger stars, or more money in the coffers. What gives?